The United States Patent and Trademark Corporation granted two recent patents to Professor Uzi Vishkin (ECE/UMIACS).
US Patent 8,145,879 describes "Computer memory architecture methods for hybrid serial and parallel computers". Its abstract summarizes the architecture as:
"In one embodiment, a serial processor is configured to execute software instructions in a software program in serial. A serial memory is configured to store data for use by the serial processor in executing the software instructions in serial. A plurality of parallel processors are configured to execute software instructions in the software program in parallel. A plurality of partitioned memory modules are provided and configured to store data for use by the plurality of parallel processors in executing software instructions in parallel. Accordingly, a processor/memory structure is provided that allows serial programs to use quick local serial memories and parallel programs to use partitioned parallel memories. The system may switch between a serial mode and a parallel mode. The system may incorporate pre-fetching commands of several varieties. For example, towards switching between the serial mode and the parallel mode, the serial processor is configured to send a signal to start pre-fetching of data from the shared memory."
U.S. Patent 8,209,690 describes a "System and Method for Thread Handling in Multithreaded Computer Systems of Nested Threads". Its abstract summarizes the system as:
"An Explicit Multi-Threading (XMT) system and method is provided for processing multiple spawned threads associated with SPAWN-type commands of an XMT program. The method includes executing a plurality of child threads by a plurality of TCUs including a first TCU executing a child thread which is allocated to it; completing execution of the child thread by the first TCU; announcing that the first TCU is available to execute another child thread; executing by a second TCU a parent-child thread that includes a nested spawn-type command for spawning additional child threads of the plurality of child threads, wherein the parent-child thread is related in a parent-child relationship to the child threads that are spawned in conjunction with the nested spawn-type command; assigning a thread ID (TID) to each child thread, wherein the TID is unique with respect to the other TIDs; and allocating a new child thread to the first TCU."
Vishkin received B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Mathematics from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel in 1974 and 1975, respectively. He received his D.Sc. degree in Computer Science is from the Technion—Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel in 1981. He was a postdoctoral fellow at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in 1981-2 and on the faculty of the Courant Institute, NYU, first full time and later part-time, from 1982 to 1988. From 1984 to 1997 he was on the faculty of Tel Aviv University, Israel, where he was Chair of Computer Science in 1987-8 and Professor of Computer Science since 1988. He was Professor of Computer Science at the Technion in 2000-2001. He has been at the University of Maryland since 1988. He has served on the editorial board of ACM Transactions on Algorithms and Parallel Processing Letters, was on the editorial board IEEE Transactions on Computers and is the Program Chair for the 18 th ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA). He has authored, or co-authored more than 130 publications. He was elected Fellow of the ACM in 1996 and is on the ISI list of most cited researchers in Computer Science.
